Twenty-First Century Fingerprinting:  Supreme Court in King to Determine Privacy Interest in Arrestee DNA

Twenty-First Century Fingerprinting: Supreme Court in King to Determine Privacy Interest in Arrestee DNA

Described by Justice Alito as “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this Court has heard in decades,” the Supreme Court’s decision in Maryland v. King will have far-reaching Fourth Amendment implications. In 2008, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Maryland DNA Collection Act, amending a 2002 statute that expanded police authority to collect DNA samples from those arrested for certain offenses. Under the statute, samples are collected at the time of arrest, but can only be analyzed once the arrestee has been charged and arraigned. Once collected, the DNA sample is immediately

[...]

Loss of Chance, Probabilistic Cause, and Damage Calculations:  The Error in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum and the Majority Rule of Damages in Many Jurisdictions More Generally

Loss of Chance, Probabilistic Cause, and Damage Calculations: The Error in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum and the Majority Rule of Damages in Many Jurisdictions More Generally

This short commentary corrects an erroneous understanding of probabilistic causation in the loss-of-chance doctrine and the damage calculation method adopted in Matsuyama v. Birnbaum. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is not alone. Many other common law courts have made the same error, including Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oklahoma.

[...]

Disclosure and Offer at Twenty-Five:  Time to Adopt Policies to Promote Fairly Negotiated Compensation

Disclosure and Offer at Twenty-Five: Time to Adopt Policies to Promote Fairly Negotiated Compensation

A quarter century ago, the Lexington, Kentucky Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center pioneered a risk management program now known as “disclosure and offer.” Its guiding principal was that patients injured by malpractice should be told about the incident and “made whole” without having to litigate. After a patient suffered an injury that the VA judged to have been caused by a departure from the standard of care, the VA contacted the patient and, along with an attorney of his choosing, invited him to meet with VA staff.

[...]

Obviously Obvious:  Federal Circuit Reverses District Court’s Decision That Online “Shopping Cart” Patents Are Nonobvious as a Matter of Law—Soverain Software LLC v. Newegg Inc.

Obviously Obvious: Federal Circuit Reverses District Court’s Decision That Online “Shopping Cart” Patents Are Nonobvious as a Matter of Law—Soverain Software LLC v. Newegg Inc.

Litigation is expensive, plain and simple. In a typical patent-infringement dispute, defending a case from start to finish—that is, from the complaint to the appeal—may cost a company upwards of a million dollars. Accordingly, the defendant-company will often choose to pay the patent holder a licensing fee instead of advancing its case to trial.

[...]

Discovering New Ways to Deter Terrorism:  The ATA and the Cross-Border Discovery Catch-22

Discovering New Ways to Deter Terrorism: The ATA and the Cross-Border Discovery Catch-22

Federal judges have a variety of tools to sanction litigants who fail to comply with discovery orders. After years of discovery disputes in Linde v. Arab Bank, PLC, the district judge issued “severe” sanctions against Arab Bank, which, according to the bank’s attorneys, turned a multi-billion-dollar case “into a show trial.” The plaintiffs are thousands of victims and family members of victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel between 1995 and 2004.

[...]


Latest Print Edition

PdfPDF by Patrick E. Tolan, Jr. | May-15-2013 |

With the election behind us, tax reform looms as the hot-button topic of the day.  Based on election results, it is likely that the Obama administration will continue to push for the same types of reforms proposed in the 2013 budget.  However, inadvertent consequences of the administration’s proposals, specifically those impacting charitable donations, may lead to unfortunate results in the rush to do something to break the gridlock on tax reform, especially while federal spending remains reduced or “sequestered” until the budget can be balanced. President Obama’s budget proposals have contemplated reducing the top rate for charitable deductions (and all itemized deductions) to 28%.  Because America’s largest donors are those in the highest marginal tax brackets, efforts to limit deductibility [...]

PdfPDF by Rebecca Curry | May-15-2013 |

Campaign finance law presents quite a puzzle:  It is an area of federal policy closely tied to the interests of incumbents in the political branches, and yet, it is controlled to a great extent by unelected federal court judges.  While we tend to assume that First Amendment considerations drive judicial review here, scholars have yet to account for political leaders’ decisions to establish federal court jurisdiction in the first place, allowing lawsuits that either challenge or enforce the law.  Can it be that Congress went to great lengths to write statutes regulating the use of money in elections, but had nothing to say about how and to what extent courts would review the law? This Article examines the role political [...]

PdfPDF by Ian Gallacher | May-15-2013 |

At the time of writing, the academic discipline of legal writing has just celebrated its twenty-fifth birthday in the United States.  This is a significant milestone and the discipline enters its second quarter century in impressively robust health:  It has three professional organizations dedicated to it, three specialist journals, an ever-expanding bibliography of articles published in other journals and law reviews, two listservs and at least one blog, and a library full of books devoted to its study and teaching.  Most law schools in the country employ faculty dedicated to teaching legal writing, many of them adjuncts, to be sure, but many more as full-time teachers.  Indeed, because the recognized best-practices model of teaching legal writing involves relatively small classes, it is likely that there [...]

PdfPDF by Sarah J. Baldwin | May-15-2013 |

A sixteen-year-old female may decide to give birth and become a mother, but she cannot independently obtain an abortion or marry the father of her child.  A young mother may relinquish rights to her child without judicial intervention, but that same teenager may not decide independently with which parent she wishes to live.  The passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment highlighted inconsistencies in the law that allowed eighteen-year-olds to fight for their country but deprived those same individuals of the right to vote for the politicians who sent them to war.  Although this debate changed the way many individuals feel, society has failed to fully integrate young people into the legal and social worlds currently populated only by adults.  Similar inconsistencies [...]

PdfPDF by Michele L. Beatty | May-15-2013 |

The Supreme Court has long stressed the importance of providing equal education opportunities to children.  Additionally, the Court has emphasized that the Due Process Clause prohibits school personnel from removing a student for violating its code of conduct “absent fundamentally fair procedures to determine whether the misconduct has occurred.”  The rights of disabled children to receive an equal education, including fundamental procedural-due-process rights, have developed considerably in the past three decades. Efforts to ensure disabled students receive the same opportunities as their nondisabled peers are reflected in both federal and state laws.  The first congressional breakthrough occurred with the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (EHA).  Over time, amendments improving the EHA were made, and [...]

PdfPDF by Michael A. Bednarz | May-15-2013 |

In the wake of the Great Depression, Congress enacted the Securities Act of 1933 (1933 Act) and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (1934 Act).  Together, the Acts provide the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with broad authority over the securities industry, and institute methods for holding those who commit securities fraud liable.  Section 15 of the 1933 Act and section 20(a) of the 1934 Act establish controlling person liability, a mechanism for establishing secondary liability against corporate directors and officers for securities fraud committed by their subordinates.  Section 15 of the 1933 Act merely permits controlling person liability to be pursued if very limited types of securities fraud have been committed.  As a result, pursuing a controlling person liability [...]

PdfPDF by Anthony V. Bova | May-15-2013 |

Wind power is now the fastest growing source of alternative energy in the United States, due in part to desires to increase utilization of cleaner energy and to withdraw from dependence on foreign energy.  Studies have shown that if properly harnessed, the United States has enough wind-energy potential to provide well over the amount of electricity currently consumed nationally.  Capitalizing on this potential, thirty-eight states currently maintain utility-scale wind projects, with fourteen states amassing over one thousand megawatts (mW) of energy from these projects. Although all current wind power generated in the United States is produced through land-based operations, the country is pursuing offshore projects—specifically the perpetually delayed Cape Wind project located off the coast of Massachusetts.  If the United States [...]


View Current & Past Print Volumes >